Monday, 13 June 2011

Head of government review says school syllabus needs to 'get back to the science in science'

Oh noes! You mean they're not going to be taught to write ecological rap songs anymore? Or worse, that our kids are going to be deprived of all this ...

In the last couple of months, the boy has been to the town centre on a school trip to pick up litter to help the environment, the girl has come home after a lesson on water preservation with a bag for the toilet cistern. She has also had a lesson whereby the kids were told to write a letter to the local MP asking for measures to save the planet and she keeps turning the heating off after being told that our staying warm kills people in Africa. Similarly, when I last told the boy to turn the light off when he leaves a room, he eagerly said he had been taught about that at school. "It's to cut down on gas in the air, isn't it Daddy?", he enthusiastically volunteered, "No, it's to bloody save money", said I.

In the name of the Lord God Gaia, what madness is this? We're going to a Saharan, err, underwater hell in a hand-sieve, so we are! There'll be alligators clutching Swedish phrase books and sun-dried penguins before you can say 'la-la-la I'm not listening, David Bellamy', I tell ya'.

Fortunately, a saviour prophet has revealed himself.

[Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics] said leaving climate change out of the national curriculum might encourage a teacher who was a climate change sceptic to abandon teaching the subject to their pupils. "This would not be in the best interests of pupils. It would be like a creationist teacher not teaching about evolution. Climate change is about science. If you remove the context of scientific concepts, you make it less interesting to children."

Thank Monbiot there is this voice of sanity, with his emotive invocation of children and a straw man so well-crafted that you could place a beany hat on it.

We demand science classes to be entirely dogma-motivated and based solely on the 'cult of the now'. I mean, why teach the basics from the bottom up and let them make their own minds up, when we can skip all the fundamental stuff from a load of square dead scientists, and just let them learn what we have already decided is the new truth?

Come on, guys! The whole point of DP's post is that the fight back has begun! An actual VIP has said that schools should stop teaching pseudo-science and start teaching real science. What do you want?

The only problem is this:

At what point in Government has the fight back started? It needs a MINISTER, preferably the Minister of Education, to say it. But it is a start.

Here is an interesting thing. You know that Alcohol Concern and ASH are hand in glove? As regards the initiative from Diago to fund the teaching of midwives about alcohol and pregnancy (though why they should need teaching, I do not know), AC are very doubtful, whereas Minister for Health, Minton, who is a bosom buddy of Deb Arnott, has welcomed the initiative!